Why is Ninja always the weakest melee?

[Fourbestintoner]

This topic almost gave me an aneurysm.

Ninja was a borderline essential or extremely-desireable party member in a raid comp for the vast majority of the existence of this MMO. Aside from that, as recently as the end of Shadowbringers last raid tier(you know, literally only a few months ago,) Ninja was the top RDPS at every percentile below 80, and the 2nd highest from eighty to max, behind only Black Mage.

https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/38#dataset=80

Ninja is historically in this game a pretty strong job. They're also likely to get buffed soon, given the statement made recently about job balance, and bringing other things up to par with Reaper rather than nerfing it.

Should it be buffed? For sure. All the melees should be very close to the same RDPS, and Ninja and Dragoon lag too far behind at the moment, imo. But "Always the weakest melee" is complete nonsense.

Yeah it was great and how it should be, lowest personal dps, highest rdps. Nin and drg should be the 2 strongest or else there is no reason to bring them over monk and reaper, and sam only exist to pad dancer rdps.
And the problem with old nin(and drg) is that they had both the utility and the damage, now they don't have either, they should at least have the highest rdps(with decent groups).